According to reports, our drag racing community has lost one of its hardest working and beloved members… Bill Bailey. For many years, Southern California racers and fans found Bill at tracks like Lions on Saturday night, Irwindale on Sunday and Orange County International Raceway and most recently at Los Angeles County Raceway north of LA, sitting at his industrial sewing machine.

I can’t recall seeing Bailey driving a racecar or hanging out in the grandstands, but he’d sit tirelessly embroidering every hat, jacket, shirt or garment with names of teams, drivers and manufacturers and he did it all freehand, something he’d learned during his time in the US Army.  He probably attended more drag races than any of us and never saw a car go down the quarter mile.

(file photo, photographer unknown)

But I remember young kids watching Bill Bailey work with their eyes glued on his big hands guiding garment after garment, applying the coolest chain stitching you could get way before computer tapes drove robotic sewing machines. Bill would always greet kids; they were all future customers, too.

Undoubtedly Bailey embroidered and stitched more patches and names onto drag fan jackets than any other, and worked out of his big red bus or right outside next to it.  Bailey and LACR owner Bernie Longjohn were longtime friends and he spent a lot of years in the dry high-desert climate of Palmdale. Back in 2004, while covering the NHRA National Open there, I spotted his latest bus project, but I never saw it run.

Bill was the founding member of the Five-B Club, Big Black Broke Bill Bailey and a cool guy with an awesome sense of humor – the kind of character a bunch of us SoCal drag racers relied on to add a new sponsor to our driving suit or hand stitch a name or patch on a new jacket.

The last time I saw Bill Bailey was the reopening of Auto Club Dragway down in Fontana, California. He was riding his senior scooter to get around and fortunately shot a photo of him that has now exploded all over Facebook since he passed away. That day, I told him it was really good to see him, to which he replied, “Hey, how you doin?”

Somewhere I still have a red, vinyl, Style Auto jacket that Big Bill hand embroidered my name and added a Dale Pulde War Eagle patch – after waiting in line at LA County Raceway.

We are losing a lot of our drag racing legends and colorful characters lately, take the time to say hello and hear their stories, none of them will be here forever.